You’re Always Losing. This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules — which he can change at any time without any notice. You can’t — in Putin’s case — campaign to vote him out of office. Your readership is dwindling because ad budgets are shrinking — while his ratings are soaring, and if you want to keep your publication afloat, you’ll have to report on everything that man says as soon as he says it, without any analysis or fact-checking, because 1) his fans will not care if he lies to their faces; 2) while you’re busy picking his lies apart, he’ll spit out another mountain of bullshit and you’ll be buried under it.
I keep hoping that there are enough real journalists (and by that I mean people who want to get to the Truth of things and bring that Truth to the American people) who take their jobs seriously, who don’t care primarily about ratings and accolades, who will band together and take on Trump in the adversarial way the press has always supposed to take on the president. I hope that this group of people exists, and that they’ll work together for the greater good of our nation to stand up to Trump, hold him and his administration accountable, and refuse to let him control them.
It’s faint hope, it’s small hope, but it’s hope.
A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media
Published
Hearseeno 